217 demanded that the penal system be made less severe, that the prison sentence replace capital, corporal, and shaming punishments as the main sanction, that the sanctions be proportionate to the criminal deed, and that the legitimizing theory of sanctions based on religious arguments be abandoned. Whereas the Enlightenment theories generally abandoned the religious legitimation of the criminal system, no one alternative came to take its place. Some authors emphasized the idea of general prevention, while others lay more weight on special prevention as the central aim of penal law. Nevertheless, no great controversy between these two trends arose in general; the debates that took place in the German states near the beginning of the eighteenth century seem to be an exception to this. In the German debates, which exerted the most influence on the embryonic Finnish legal science, the theories of Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach came to prevail over the the special preventive theories of E. F. Klein, G. A. C. Kleinschrod, and C. L. W. von Grolman.^5 Feuerbach’s theorv of criminal law represents well the nascent liberal conceptions of state and society of the early nineteenth century, for Feuerbach was a positivist; he was almost disinterested in the historical development of law and was in favor of codification. It was in the works of Feuerbach that the subjectification of crime first started to be visualized, although he did not yet consistently divide the criminal deed into subjective and objective components; such a division did not materialize until the late nineteenth century.For Feuerbach, the concept of crime was based on the externally observable deed.^®^ Consciciusness of the criminal deed’s punishability and illegality {Rechtswidrigkeit) — an important component of criminal intent in Feuerbach’s theory — could, for Feuerbach, be presumed to have been at hand whenever it was not obvious that the wrongdoer lacked such consciousness.As Feuerbach was against free evaluation of proof, no conflict arose between that and his theorv of crime. All the elements of crime that were essential for his theory could be proven by the legal theory of proof. There is a certain continuation from the Enlightenment to the Classical School of criminal law, although Backman has pointed out some basic differences between the two. However, these differences, such as the rejection of the theory of social contract, and natural law theories in the ideology of the Classical School, need not concern us here.'*^ There are two reasons for this. First, Backm.^n 1976 pp. 43. Ibid. p. 63-67. Ibid. pp. 77, 85-86. According to Backman, some ot Feuerbach’s thoughts were ahead of his time, for Feuerbach was a determinist and in favor of relativist penal theories. See also Utriainen 1984 pp. 4-7. Utriainen 1984 p. 14. .ts Feuerbach 1832 pp. 33-36. Ibid. pp. 64-67. According to Backman, classical criminal lawwas more influenced by German idealism than 34
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